News & Events

The European Commission has been supporting access to effective research infrastructures for researchers all over Europe for more than a decade. This action has been instrumental in enhancing European researchers' access to the infrastructures they require to conduct their research, irrespective of the location of the facility.

It is now possible to see on an interactive map the location of research infrastructures that open their doors to all researchers in Europe.

David Foster, Chairman of the Programme Committee for the 2013 TERENA Networking Conference, writes in the Call for Papers for that conference: National Research and Education Networks are facing a period of change and evolving their business models and service offerings. With increasing emphasis on international collaborations, user communities need innovative approaches to exploit the rapid evolution of technologies that are increasingly reliant on excellent networking.

This edition of the Compendium documents that evolution in several different ways.
Technological innovation remains at the heart of what National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) are about. Due to the advent of highcapacity networks, congestion at the levels of campus, backbone and external connections seems to have been largely resolved for the time being.
In recent years, two key innovations have shaped NREN developments:
• NRENs have started to develop and deploy new Authentication and
Authorisation Infrastructures;
• The spread of ‘dark fibre’ networks has enabled novel network architectures that are both more cost-effective and better able to meet changing user demands.